Vegetarian?

I cannot express how I excited I am for this unit we have started with Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I had been looking forward to this since I saw it in the syllabus because of my own experience with becoming a vegetarian.   I had said when I signed up for this course that it would probably have a great impact on how I feel about staying vegetarian and ultimately if I will continue with the diet.  I was especially excited after our class discussion to find that Chris was a vegetarian for ten years and had raised her kids to have this diet as well.

My own becoming a vegetarian started about a year ago when I began experiencing severe health problems.  It came to a point where I was hospitalized because I had been unable to eat or drink anything for almost five days.  I had already been to a GI specialist who had diagnosed me with IBS, and gave me pills to help with symptoms.  It became clear that this diagnosis was incorrect when I was hospitalized.  My doctors were very confused at what was happening because I was a healthy nineteen year old who was active and practiced healthy eating habits.  I was ultimately diagnosed after almost two days in the hospital with gull bladder disease and had my gull bladder removed.  This diagnosis was a surprise to my family and me, but not to the doctors.  We found out that people at younger ages are having their gull bladders taken out at higher rates not due to bad diets as is generally the cause.  The doctors explained that because I had a healthy lifestyle, my gull bladder disease was caused by a combination of two things: the consumption of prescription medications and the steroids that are put in our seemingly healthy foods (mostly meats).  This was shocking to me, I was never a sickly person, so it was not like I had abused prescription medications by any means, and my parents had raised me on a very healthy diet. 

This causation spoke volumes to me about our society.  In our American society we thrive on money and the idea of time.  We are constantly racing one place to another, which is very different from other societies.  There was a large possibility that I was given prescription medications from my doctors for reasons that could have been cured without medications.  This over usage of prescription pads in the case of doctors generally happens to speed up the turnover of one patient to the next as well as the influence of the pharmaceutical companies to make more money.  Our food industry is set up in a very similar fashion where we are given meats that have such large amount of steroids in them that they are affecting our health, just to speed up the growing process of the animals and to make more money.  I love that Kingsolver has strong political undertones throughout her book about these issues that I feel have impacted my physical being so much.

After doing a large amount of research about gull bladder disease and our food industry I decided to go vegetarian.  My symptoms after the surgery went away faster and I feel like I am living a lifestyle that will be much healthier for me in the long run.  In a society of many people who do not understand why I have a diet such as this it is empowering to read about a family who went against the larger amount of society to live a healthier, greener lifestyle.

See Ya Michigan!

Maybe my disconnect with Michigan started when I was seven and my brother was pushing me down the hill on my sled and I ran head-on into a birch tree, or maybe when I was up north at our cottage and was the only kid out of eight cousins that couldn’t get in the tree house, or even on the bike ride from the Upper Tahquamenon Falls to the Lower when I threw my bike in a ditch and said I was done riding.  I am not sure when I became so set on leaving Michigan, but I have been dreaming of it for most of my life.  My mom had left Michigan and lived in San Francisco, California for about a year when she was in her twenties, and since I have heard about her experiences and seen the city itself I have known it is where I belong.  Reading and discussing Allison Swan’s book Fresh Water has made me realize that while I have spent so much of my life waiting to get out of Michigan, I have missed out on the state’s Great Lakes, four seasons, and its beauty.  I had no idea that the Great Lakes were the largest source of fresh water in the world, that statistic to me is astounding.

 Looking back on my experiences as a child, I was not deprived of nature by any means, in fact my parents went above and beyond spending family vacations and everyday events out in nature, no matter how much any of us resisted.  We spent summers on all of the Great Lakes, and have pictures of us swimming in each one.  We spent falls up north in the Upper Peninsula watching the leaves change.  We spent winters outside skiing and sledding.  We spent springs up north with our extended family in our cottage surrounded by the acres my Grandparents own.  Still through all of these experiences I have somehow been able to see past the natural beauty and been distracted by my selfish desire to leave this state.  Maybe it’s now time for me to reconnect.  Michigan may not be where I belong, but I cannot let that fact allow me to see past the beauty of where I grew up.

Reconnecting With Nature Experience

Along with this class I am taking the Honors College cluster class Environment, Technology and Values.  Taking these classes together is a great experience as I am able to connect different aspects of the two classes together, especially in writing.  I recently had an experience with this class that has inspired me to write a blog entry about it for this class.  Our teacher Sister Ginny scheduled a trip for us to go to the Transformations Spirituality Center on Nazareth’s Campus to take part in a program she wrote and has given classes in for years called Reconnecting with Nature.  I came into the experience wondering why I had to waste three hours sitting in nature on a Friday afternoon, but the experience was definitely one that changed my perspective of nature itself.  Sister Ginny began by giving us a map of the area that we would spending time in that afternoon and giving us some background on how the area came to be.  It was incredible to hear that she basically took this raw piece of land, created trails lined with planks and bridges, and planted greenery throughout most of her life.  I could not even imagine being able to see this area transformed over the years. 

When I was given the instructions that I would be spending the first half hour by myself in nature I was shocked and figured I would have to figure out a way to entertain myself for the time.  The idea of walking into nature by myself was astounding because as I started this half hour I could not even remember a time that I was in nature completely alone.   This first half hour went by so fast that I almost missed the time to meet back with the class.  It was very interesting to see what things I noticed while surrounded by nature entirely.  I found it to be extremely serene and that I felt at peace without any feeling of stress.  One thing that I noticed was the way the sun looked when it reflected off of different things found in nature.  This became very apparent to me when I got to what was called the babbling brook bridge and took a seat to watch the water.  It was very beautiful and peaceful to hear the sound of the water as I watched it rippling around in movement.  I remember feeling so stress free that when I got up from the babbling brook bridge and kept walking into the distance and heard the sound of traffic that I became annoyed that the outside noise was interfering with the sounds in nature.  Our class met up once again to discuss our experience before departing again for another half hour in nature by ourselves.  I took a different trail then I had the first time that ended up connecting with the trail I had been on the first time.  I actually ended up sitting back on the babbling brook bride again.  It was beautiful to watch the sand in the bottom of the brook move along with the water.  I ended up spending almost the full half hour back there at this spot again, and it was so peaceful that I felt at home in this spot.   Just being able to sit on this bridge for an hour took my stress away for the rest of the day.

My Porch

Starting a blog was very difficult for me, mostly because I have never even kept a diary or journal of any sort.  On top of that, I am not a very creative writer; I am used to writing lab reports, behavioral protocols, and assessments.  So the assignment to start a creative blog about my experiences in nature was not only difficult, but a little scary.  After a few weeks of procrastination, ideas of blogs thrown away, and nervousness I finally came up with a great exercise to get my brain flowing.  I live in an old house on South Park Street in Kalamazoo’s historic district, which I think I sometimes take for granted.  Living in this downtown area allows me to be surrounding be a lot more nature then the parking lots I was surrounding by in an apartment complex.  Not only am I surrounding by all of this beautiful scenery, but I have a beautiful porch to enjoy it from.   To some people a porch is no big deal, and often not used enough, but to me this porch is amazing.  I never had a porch attached to my house growing up, and I have always thought there is something serene about ending your day reading a book your porch as the sun sets.  So I have taken my laptop outside to sit on the porch, surrounding by nature, simply to observe the things around me. 

I think the fact that my house is placed on a rather busy street tends to make people forget how much nature we are still surrounded by.  Directly in front of my house is a beautiful tree with the richest color of red leaves I have seen in a long time.  I have no idea what kind of tree this is, because I know very little about trees, but this tree and its colors were mesmerizing enough that I stared at it and stop typing for 10 minutes.  Just taking the time to stop typing led me to start observing other parts of the nature around me.  The way the sun shines down through the red of the leaves in this tree is incredible and I have decided that I should eventually take pictures of this.  Our porch has a large bush of some sort that surrounds it on all sides.  This bush has thorns in it, which has always made me not want to even get near it, but when I took the time to actually look at the bush I realized it is beautiful.  The shape of the leaves along with the swirling of the thorns makes this bush an interesting maze of sorts. 

This exercise of literally just setting myself out in nature to write helped me enormously and has changed my perspective of the blogging assignment.  Not only do I have to be proud of myself for finishing my first journal entry of my life, but for coming up with lots of different ideas for blog entries.  The only downfall to taking my writing outdoors and observing nature around me is that I am now done blogging for the day to take a walk around observing some more.